Philosophy is born of the marriage of two Greek words, philos- and sophia. Philos is
one of Ancient Greek s many words for love, while sophia is the Greek word for
wisdom. And so philosophy was originally (and for some of us perennially) about
the love of wisdom. There has much been much ink spilled
on this question of wisdom over the years on what it is and how to attain it. In his
work Recapture the Rapture, Jamie Wheal identifies a distinction between two alternative
paths to wisdom that I find particularly useful for navigating this landscape:
ekstasis and catharsis. ?
Ecstasis Ecstasis is a Greek term meaning to stand
outside oneself ; it is the etymological mother of our English words
ecstasy and ecstatic. The word Ekstasis points to the
experience of insight; it is a moment of total immersion in being. Your inner critic goes quiet
and you are dissolved in a state of awe and wonder when everything seems to click.
_________ It can be fruitfully connected to the Greek word
kairos which is one of Ancient Greek s two words for time. Their other word for
time is the more familiar word chronos from which we get terms like chronic, chronology and
chronicles. Chronos is the measure of time by seconds, days and millennia.
But the great Franciscan friar Richard Rohr describes the alternative species of time
by saying that: __________
kairos was deep time. It was when you have those moments where you say,
Oh my God, this is it. I get it. Or, This is as perfect as it can be. Or, It
doesn t get any better than this. Or, This moment is summing up the last five
years of my life things like that, where time comes to a fullness, and the dots
connect. _________
Kairos isn t measured in seconds or minutes but in moments. There is the mundane
quotidian chronological time that we commonly live in and then there is kairos a
space in time where all becomes clearer, everything crystallises.
These kairotic moments are moments of ekstasis. Another idea that brings us closer to
the meaning of ekstasis is the term peak experience . And peak is the correct word
here because from the vantage point of such experiences, all the world seems clearer.
You have a higher perspective looking down on the vastness and the grand scale of
things rather than getting lost in the thickets of mundanity as we do in everyday life.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi the father of flow state research
has written that: ___________
There are moments that stand out from the chaos of everyday as shining
beacons. In many ways, one might say that the whole effort of humankind
through millennia of history has been to capture these fleeting moments of
fulfillment and make them a part of everyday existence
We seek ekstasis because it is transformative. In our everyday lives we are busy
climbing the ladder; in ekstasis we see that despite the great heights we ve attained, the
ladder we have been scaling is up against the wrong wall.
Seeing the whole gives the parts meaning, gives the everyday meaning. It sounds like a
delightful experience on paper but as Gordon Wasson has explained, it s not an
addictive sort of experience: _______
In common parlance, among the many who have not experienced ecstasy,
ecstasy is fun, and I am frequently asked why I do not reach for mushrooms
every night. But ecstasy is not fun. Your very soul is seized and shaken until it
tingles. After all, who will choose to feel undiluted awe, or to float through that
door yonder into the Divine Presence?
The unknowing vulgar abuse the word, and we must recapture its full
and terrifying sense A few hours later, the next morning, you are fit to go to work. But how
unimportant work seems to you, by comparison with the portentous happenings
of that night! _________
This is ekstasis: it is Muhammad on the mountain being overwhelmed with revelations
of splendour and Neo taking the red pill in the Matrix and having the horrors of reality
revealed to him. The experience of ekstasis can be triggered
in a whole host of different ways from sex and psychedelics, to music, dance, meditation
and breathwork. Whatever the trigger, the results of ekstasis are the same:
the experience of transcendence transforms. It changes your perspective on life. You can
see further; you are looking out from a higher vantage point and you cannot go back.
? Catharsis
If ekstasis is a going up, catharsis is a going down. It is not going to the mountain for
higher perspective; it is a descent into the depths of Hell. Catharsis is the way of
healing; it is the uncertain process of generating light in the deepest corner of the night.
Catharsis is an Ancient Greek word meaning purification or cleansing . Aristotle
was the one that first brought this term into the philosophical domain in his book
Poetics. For him it was about the power of art speaking specifically about tragedy
to bring about a purification of our emotions. What we experience with tragedy is the
cleansing of our emotions through their expression. It s not about becoming happy as
with watching a comedy; it s about being cleansed by going on a journey into the
heart of darkness we identify with Oedipus as he uncovers the horrible truth of his life
and with Orestes as he kills his own mother in revenge for her murder of his father.
We are torn apart by the cruelty of fate with King Lear and with Hamlet.
__________ In the sense that we are speaking of here,
catharsis is not simply an artistic process but a living transformation. This is compassion
in its purest etymological sense of suffering with.
The archetypal pattern of catharsis is captured in Dante s Divine Comedy and his
journey into the depths of Hell descending its many layers and levels and arriving at
its ultimate depths passing every horror of torturous misery and suffering
imaginable along the way. And then, when he reaches the very bottom,
Dante leaves Hell. He doesn t escape Hell by going backwards and taking a different route;
this is what we believe when we are still in Hell that Paradise is an alteration
of the past. __________
Dante s great revelation was that you don t escape Hell by going back; at the end of the
Inferno, Dante leaves Hell by climbing down the leg of the Devil himself.
Dante has descended to the very core of the earth, and, by climbing down/up this leg
of Satan, he begins to rise out the other side and emerge into the dawn of Purgatory
and finally the blinding light of Paradise. Dante s geography of suffering tells us that
if we descend deep enough into the depths, we emerge into a light that is greater than
anything we could have previously imagined.
The lesson of the Divine Comedy and the lesson of catharsis itself is that Paradise is
not in the opposite direction to Hell but beyond it. It is only by going through Hell that
we are transformed. It is this philosophy of catharsis that
runs like a red thread throughout Nietzsche s writings. It is this he is driving at when he
writes in the Gay Science: __________
What if pleasure and displeasure were so tied together that whoever wanted to
have as much as possible of one must also have as much as possible of the other
that whoever wanted to learn to jubilate up to the heavens would also have
to be prepared for depression unto death ? [ ]
You have the choice: either as little displeasure as possible, painlessness in brief
or as much displeasure as possible as the price for the growth of an
abundance of subtle pleasures and joys that have rarely been relished yet? If
you decide for the former and desire to diminish and lower the level of human
pain, you also have to diminish and lower the level of their capacity
for joy. ________
It is this Nietzschean cathartic philosophy that Viktor Frankl says was a life raft he
could hold onto through his hellish journey through the concentration camps of the
Nazis with Nietzsche s maxim he who has a why can handle almost any how as his
guiding mantra. Conclusion
Ekstasis and catharsis are the two paths to wisdom. It doesn t take a death camp to
reach catharsis any more than it takes psychedelics to reach ekstasis; these things
happen naturally in the course of life, in the moments of insight that crystallise in us,
from the breakthroughs and meaning we find in our darkest moments. The history of
philosophy draws from both. Plato is perhaps the icon of ekstasis while Nietzsche and
Kierkegaard are exemplars of catharsis. Both paths proclaim philosophy s core
etymological concern for loving wisdom. That s everything for this episode of the living
philosophy. If you ve enjoyed it please give the video a thumbs up down below
and if you have any thoughts insights or feedback I d love to hear from you down in
the comments otherwise I shall see you next time thanks for watching.